The Same Man: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love and War by David Lebedoff (Random House 2008)

On that same balmy night in June of 1930, while Waugh was amusing the duchess, a young man of the same age but very different appearance, Eric Blair, was working alone in a small, shabby room in the working-class section of Leeds, a manufacturing city in the north. He was the unwelcome guest of his brother-in-law, who regarded this lodger as a penniless failure with no job and no future.

This opinion was shared by almost everyone acquainted with Blair. It was a relatively small group but one that included several experts on failure; they had learned about it firsthand. Blair looked, and often smelled, like a tramp, because he was one. He, however, made the distinction that he wasn’t really a tramp, but only chose to be among tramps to free himself from class prejudices about poverty and dirt. He put it this way: “When you have shared a bed with a tramp and drunk tea out of the same snuff-tin, you feel that you have seen the worst and the worst has no terrors for you.

The Fallen: Life In and Out of Britain's Most Insane Group by Dave Simpson (Canongate 2008)

Like any classic long-running British soap opera, The Fall has minor characters and major characters, although even the latter can suddenly disappear and the saga just rolls on. In the bewildering Fall cast, few characters have made as much impact with their appearance and disappearance as Marc Riley – who has since gone on to other prominent roles but during his time in The Fall (June 1978 to December 1982) loomed as large over events and music as Ken Barlow in Coronation Street.

What I know about Riley is this: he joined after hanging around with The Fall and becoming one of their sporadic road crew. Thus, Riley replaced Eric the Ferret, who replaced Jonnie Brown, who replaced Tony Friel. He became the eleventh disciple to join in the first two years, his reign predating but outlasting Steve Davies. In the month he signed up, cricketer Ian Botham became the first man in the history of the game to score a century and take eight wickets in one innings of a Test match. Albums lining up against The Fall’s 1979 Live at the Witch Trials debut at the time included Prince’s debut For You, Dire Straits’ first eponymous album, Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town and X-Ray Spex’s punky, saxophoney Germfree Adolescents. Margaret Thatcher was in power. It seems a world away.

As does December 1982, the month he left, when Thatcher still had years ahead of her, but the pop landscape was changing. Manchester greats like The Smiths and New Order were edging towards Top of the Pops. Neil Kinnock was elected Labour leader and Michael Jackson’s Thriller rapidly became the biggest-selling album of all time. Riley’s five-year stint was a relative lifetime in The Wonderful and Frightening World but coincides with the beginnings of The Fall’s noble ascent from indie cultdom to national institution

Dog Eats Dog by Iain Levison (Bitter Lemon Press 2008)

Elias was so relieved to see a smile that he felt compelled to offer more information as fast as he could make it up, as if to cement a friendship that was forming between them. Between the guy who said bizarre untrue things about his pistol, and this intractable old bastard of a gun-shop owner.

“It was my father’s gun,” he said. “He just passed away. I just found it in the house. My father was a soldier in World War Two.”

“This gun isn’t military issue,” said the shopkeeper, shaking his head, as if bored with Elias’s lies. “This is chrome-plated. And it was manufactured well after that. If the serial number hadn’t been filed off, I could tell you exactly when, but I figure, oh, about 1950s.” He was looking at Elias now, as if he expected either honesty or silence. He slid a piece of black metal across the counter, then opened the box of bullets. “The war was over by then. You should learn about history,” he said.

Elias was so taken aback by this country bumpkin telling him to learn about history that he almost blurted out that he was a history professor who was about to get tenure and was going to be published in the National Historical Review. Then he remembered, from deceiving Denise, the joy and energy that came from playing dumb. “My dad must have bought it recently, I guess,” he said humbly.

The shopkeeper loaded bullets into the magazine. “This is how you load it,” he said, pressing each bullet down into the clip with a slow, deliberate gesture, looking up at Elias to make sure he was being heeded. “It takes seven slugs.” He slid the magazine into the grip. “This lever here drops the magazine back out of the grip when it’s empty.”

Elias nodded.

“Can you shoot, or do you need lessons?”

Rejoice, Rejoice!: Britain in the 1980s by Alwyn Turner (Aurum Press 2008)

With a few exceptions – the anonymous narrator of Raymond’s Factory novels, Rankin’s John Rebus exploring the seedier side of Edinburgh with ‘its crooks and bandits, its whore and gamblers, its perpetual losers and winners’ – these characters primarily inhabited the small towns and middle-class world that had characterized the golden age. Even in Taggart, firmly located in Glasgow, the murderers whose stories were told in the first three series included a couple of small businessmen, a guest-house owner, a doctor, a philosophy student, a dentist and an ex-probation worker, as well as a group of bereaved parents meting out justice to the drug dealer responsible for their children’s deaths. Despite the urban setting, this is a world away from The Sweeney; there are no car chases, just Sgt Livingston running after teenagers and getting bitten by the occasional dog, and there is little suggestion of a criminal class separate from society: these are just ordinary, respectable people caught up in their own lives. And, at the other extreme of television detection, there was Jim Bergerac, investigating much smaller problems on Jersey and learning ‘to take the smooth with the smooth’.

Though the backdrop might have suggested a retreat from the city to the closed communities of Agatha Christie (encapsulated by Colin Watson as Mayhem Parva), there was an edge, to the literature at least, that was far removed from the cosiness of Miss Marple, an engagement with society, a desire to comment on contemporary mores. And although the likes of Morse and Dalgliesh spent much of their time behaving as though they were still autonomous detectives in the tradition of Holmes and Poirot, capable of solving any case through the exercise of their intellect, the central characters were still police officers, and couldn’t fail to notice the changing role of the force in the modern world. In one of Rendell’s novels, Inspector Burden initiates the putting of coloured lights in the tree outside the police station ‘in the interest of promoting jollier relations with the public’. His boss, Wexford, disapproves of the gesture, but it’s revealing that there was a perceived need for such a move: ‘surely you couldn’t go on feeling antagonistic towards or afraid of or suspicious about a friendly body that hung fairy-lights in a tree in its front garden?’ Elsewhere Peter Robinson’s character Inspector Banks was becoming increasingly disillusioned with the new role of the force: ‘he had many objections to the way the government seemed to look upon the police as a private army of paid bully boys to pit against people with genuine grievances and a constitutional right to air them.’ He consoles himself with the thought that he’s a detective ‘and he didn’t have to go on crowd control, bashing the bonces of the proletariat.’ But even detectives are affected by the rise of what Reginald Hill’s Andy Dalziel refers to as ‘porkism’, as his own sergeant concludes: ‘A man’s got to be mad to stay in a job where the public hates you and Maggie Thatcher loves you.’

Most political of all was Derek Raymond’s detective sergeant, who reflects on the police powers promised in a new piece of legislation (presumably inspired by the controversial Police and Criminal Evidence Act of 1984): ‘It was what I thought of as banana laws – the law of a society in the process of breaking down. Once properly tightened up, it would have meant that I could stop and arrest a man in the street simply because I didn’t like the look on his face, or the way his pockets bulged. It would have synchronized nicely with the plastic ID cards that every citizen would be required to carry by then, and before long we would have turned the country into a birdcage.’

Books: a memoir by Larry McMurtry (Simon & Schuster 2008)

I don't remember either of my parents ever reading me a story—perhaps that's why I've made up so many. They were good parents, but just not story readers. In 1936, when I was born, the Depression sat heavily on all but the most fortunate, a group that didn't include us. My McMurtry grandparents were both still alive, and my mother and father and I lived in their house, which made for frequent difficulties. Sometimes there was a cook and a resident cowboy—where they bunked, I'm not sure. The fifty yards or so between the house and the barn boiled with poultry. My first enemies were hens, roosters, peacocks, turkeys. We ate lots of the hens, but our consumption of turkeys, peacocks, and roosters was, to my young mind, inexcusably slow.

I believe my grandfather, William Jefferson McMurtry, who died when I was four, did tell me stories, but they were all stories about his adventures as a Texas pioneer and, as far as I can remember, did not include imaginary beings, such as one might find in Grimm or Anderson.

Gig: The Life and Times of a Rock-star Fantasist by Simon Armitage (Viking 2008)

On The Road 9

A reading in a cinema complex in Sheffield for the Off the Shelf Festival, followed by a Q & A session on contemporary poetics and related literary topics:

Me: OK, one last question.

Man: In a fist fight between you and Jarvis Cocker, who'd win?

Me: Er . . . I've never met him, but from the pictures I've seen I'd have to fancy my chances.

Man: He's outside.

All the Sad Young Literary Men by Keith Gessen (Viking 2008)

I found the Mensheviks kind, intelligent, witty. But everything I saw convinced me that, face to face with the ruthlessness of history, they were wrong.

- Victor Serge

Mark's dissertation, in the end, was about Roman Sidorovich, 'the funny Menshevik." Lenin had called him that, menshevitskiy khakhmach, in 1911. Sidorovich was tickled, "I'd rather be menshevitskiy khakhmach" he said (to friends) "than bolshevitskiy palach." I'd rather be the Menshevik funny-man than the Bolshevik hangman. Oops.

They were all in Switzerland then, having fled the scrutiny of the tsar's secret police. In 1917, they all, Lenin and Trotsky and Sidorovich, returned home after the tsar abdicated. Or anyway Mark thought they did. The truth is, Sidorovich was too minor a figure for anyone to have noticed when exactly he returned, what exactly he was wearing, his friends and widow gave contradictory accounts, and his personal papers were confiscated in the 1930s. But Mark thought he could see him in the documentary evidence, cracking jokes. It was in fact the task of his dissertation to prove that many of the anonymously attributed humorous remarks of 1917 ("someone joked," "a wit replied") were attributable to Roman Sidorovich.

In 1920, after securing power, Lenin exiled many of the Mensheviks. The Sidoroviches found themselves in Berlin, where Roman briefly succumbed to the temptation to write humorous book reviews for Rul', the liberal paper associated with, among others, Nabokov's father. In 1926, however, Sidorovich grew bored and depressed and asked to be allowed back into the country. He was allowed. Five years later, he was arrested, and his "humorous remarks," the ones Mark spent all his time authenticating, were spat back at him during his interrogation. It turned out the Bolsheviks had a very good memory for humorous remarks.

"I confessed to the good ones right away," Sidorovich said later.

"Then they tortured me, and I confessed to the bad ones, too.

"Then they tortured me some more," he also apparently said, a few times, "and I blamed the bad ones on my friends."

The record of the interrogation had not survived. But it was known that Sidorovich received a five-year sentence in Verkhne-Udalsk. He returned to Moscow in 1936 and was rearrested in early 1941. He was on his back to Verkhne-Udalsk, or beyond, when the Germans invaded. At this point history lost track of Roman Sidorovich, and so did Mark.

Kill Your Friends by John Niven (Harper Perennial 2008)

What do I think? Honestly? I think I would like to see you and the rest of your band die screaming in agony from something like testicular cancer. I think that last week I spent a hundred and eighty pounds on a necktie and lost it a few hours later, drunk in Soho. I think about telling these hopeless, penniless cunts this. But instead, pointlessly, I say, 'Great guitar sound.'

'Yeah,' the manager says, and he starts crapping on about how Doug - or whoever - has been playing guitar since he was a fucking foetus or something. Doug looks up from the floor and smiles bashfully. It's about all I can do not to punch his stupid, talentless face in. To stand up, run the length of the room, and boot him full-force in his pasty, pimply, stinking indie chops. But - ever reasonable - I just nod and listen and say things like 'yeah?' and 'yeah' and 'great' and 'really?' for a long time.

I hate indie music. Until a couple of years ago you didn't really have to think about it. It was just a couple of hundred losers fucking around in Camden. Then a pair of Mancunian losers rock up clutching a Beatles songbook and suddenly you've got to listen to all this shite and take all these meetings in case you miss the next one. It's a fucking nightmare.

The Roar of the Butterflies by Reginald Hill (Anchor Canada 2008)

Joe Sixsmith was adrift in space.

Light years beneath him gleamed the tiny orb he was supposed to make contact with, but he knew it was an impossible dream.

His muscles had melted, his lungs were starved of oxygen, and the only part of his mind not paralysed by terror was the bit that dealt with ’fonlies.

’fonly I’d done this … ’fonly I’d done that …

‘No use messing with ’fonlies,’ Aunt Mirabelle used to say. ‘’fonlies don’t get your homework done, Joseph. You miss your football Saturday morning, you’ve got no one to blame ’cept yourself.’

How right she was! No one to blame ’cept himself … except maybe Willie Woodbine for being such a socials climber … and Beryl Boddington maybe for standing him up … and definitely Merv Golightly for having a mouth like the Channel Tunnel … but first and last and as usual, himself, Joseph Gaylord (even Mirabelle kept quiet about that) Sixsmith for always going boldly half-assed where nobody had ever come back from before!

Wild Boy: My Life in Duran Duran by Andy Taylor (Grand Central Publishing 2008)

There was worse to come. "New Moon on Monday" was our least favourite video of all. Everybody in the band hates it, particularly the dreadful scene at the end where we all dance together. Even today, I cringe and leave the room if anyone plays the video. We shot it just outside Paris on the third of January 1984, and we were all miserable because we hadn't had a long enough Christmas holiday. Our management had convinced us to theme it on the French Revolution, and it also had historic references to the French Resistance - but, to be honest, it was just a load of gibberish. The set was dark and cold, and we spent most of the day drinking alcohol. By the time we were dancing at the end I was half cut. It is one of the few times I've seen Nick dance (watch his shoulders moving up and down if you ever get another chance to see it!). We were very uncomfortable with the whole thing. After "New Moon on Monday," we all thought, Bollocks - let's do something that's fundamental and solid.

The answer was a spectacular live video in the form of "The Reflex."

The Good Son by Russel D. McLean (Minotaur Books 2008)

Nearly a week before the night I found myself ready to kill a man in cold blood, I was angling for the security of a job that paid up front.

Which is why I was grateful for the business of any client. Especially the man who huffed his way into the offices of McNee Investigations.

James Robertson stuffed himself into the sixties-style recliner I'd picked up a few weeks earlier at the Salvation Army store on West Marketgait. He was sweating, even though it was a cool day. As if he'd swum across the Tay rather than taking the bridge. The handkerchief tucked into the breast pocket of his suit jacket looked damp.

I offered my hand. His was slick and threatened to slip from my grasp. 

It wasn't his size, even if he was a large man. No, the sweat came from agitation. Robertson was tense, his muscles practically humming they were stretched so taut.

Doors Open by Ian Rankin (Orion 2008)

Mike saw it happen. There were two doors next to one another. One of them seemed to be permanently ajar by about an inch, except when someone pushed at its neighbour. As each liveried waiter brought trays of canapés into the salesroom, the effect was the same. One door would swing open, and the other would slowly close. It said a lot about the quality of the paintings, Mike thought, that he was paying more attention to a pair of doors. But he knew he was wrong: it was saying nothing about the actual artworks on display, and everything about him.

Mike Mackenzie was thirty-seven years old, rich and bored. According to the business pages of various newspapers, he remained a “self-made software “mogul’, except that he was no longer a mogul of anything. His company had been sold outright to a venture capital consortium. Rumour had it that he was a burn-out, and maybe he was. He’d started the software business fresh from university with a friend called Gerry Pearson. Gerry had been the real brains of the operation, a genius programmer, but shy with it, so that Mike quickly became the public face of the company. After the sale, they’d split the proceeds fifty-fifty and Gerry then surprised Mike by announcing that he was off to start a new life in Sydney. His emails from Australia extolled the virtues of nightclubs, city life and surfing (and not, for once, the computer kind). He would also send Mike JPEGs and mobile-phone snaps of the ladies he encountered along the way. The quiet, reserved Gerry of old had disappeared, replaced by a rambunctious playboy—which didn’t stop Mike from feeling like a bit of a fraud. He knew that without Gerry, he’d have failed to make the grade in his chosen field.

Cold in Hand by John Harvey (Harcourt Books 2008)

For the first time in a long while, Resnick's heart failed to lift as he neared the ground, Graham Millington and himself part of the small crowd turning off London Road and crossing the canal, a bright sky but the air suddenly cold enough to catch their breath. Once inside, Millington, more a creature of habit even than Resnick himself, stood in line for cups of Bovril and a brace of meat-and-potato pies. Their seats were close to the halfway line, some ten or twelve rows back, the grass an almost luminous green promising something special, something magical.

The first fifteen minutes of mistimed tackles and misplaced passes soon gave lie to that, the crowd saving most of their invective - officials aside - for the perceived shortcomings of their own team. Never bad enough to occasion a chorus of "You're Not Fit to Wear the Shirt," but close. Not that the visitors were a whole lot better, a mixture of superannuated cloggers and earnest youngsters, none of them showing much wit or ambition, until, the interval not far off, they went close with a twenty-five yard volley which the Notts goalkeeper did well to tip over the bar.

"Bloody hell!" Millington said. "That was a near thing." And then, glancing sideways, "Come on, Charlie, they're not playing that badly."

Resnick was sitting there, shoulders hunched, tears running soundlessly down his face.

Submarine by Joe Dunthorne (Random House 2008)

"Ah ha," Chips says, finding a page upon which he cameos. He adopts a whiny voice that is a bad impression of Zoe: "Jean who works breakfasts understands. She says that I am very mature for my age. She says that she has had a fluctuating waistline all her life and it's never done her any harm. She says that kids can be cruel. I told her I felt like crying in Geography when Chips said: 'I bet you eat your dinner off a tectonic plate.'" Chips looks up.
"I forgot I said that."

Netherland by Joseph O'Neill (Vintage Contemporaries 2008)

We traveled the length of Coney Island Avenue, that low-slung, scruffily commercial thoroughfare that stands in almost surreal contrast to the tranquil residential blocks it traverses, a shoddily bustling strip of vehicles double-parked in front of gas stations, synagogues, mosques, beauty salons, bank branches, restaurants, funeral homes, auto-body shops, supermarkets, assorted small businesses proclaiming provenances from Pakistan, Tajikistan, Ethiopia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Armenia, Ghana, the Jewry, Christendom, Islam: it was on Coney Island Avenue, on a subsequent occasion, that Chuck and I came upon a bunch of South African Jews, in full sectarian regalia, watching televised cricket with a couple of Rastafarians in the front office of a Pakistan-run lumberyard. This miscellany was initially undetectable by me. It was Chuck, over the course of subsequent instructional drives, who pointed everything out to me and made me see something of the real Brooklyn, as he called it.

When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson (Anchor Canada 2008)

Was there a kind of lottery (Reggie imagined a tombola) where God picked out your chosen method of going - 'Heart attack for him, cancer for her, let's see, have we had a terrible car crash yet this month?' Not that Reggie believed in God, but it was interesting sometimes to imagine. Did God get out of bed one morning and draw back the curtains (Reggie's imaginary God led a very domesticated life) and think, 'A drowning in a hotel swimming pool today, I fancy. We haven't had that one in a while.'

City of Thieves by David Benioff (Plume Book 2008)

"One of the most beautiful passages in literature, you know. His professor had been a famous writer back in his day, but now he's completely forgotten. Radchenko feels ashamed for the old man. He watches him through his bedroom window - Radchenko never leaves his apartment; remember, he hasn't left in seven years - he watches the professor walk out of sight, kicking at the pigeons and cursing them." Kolya cleared his throat and switched to his declamatory tone. "Talent must be a fanatical mistress. She's beautiful; when you're with her, people watch you, they notice. But she bangs on your door at odd hours, and she disappears for long stretches, and she has no patience for the rest of your existence: your wife, your children, your friends. She is the most thrilling evening of your week, but some day she will leave you for good. One night, after she's been gone for years, you will see her on the arm of a younger man, and she will pretend not to recognize you."
Kolya's apparent immunity to exhaustion aggravated and amazed me. I could keep moving only by sighting a distant tree and promising myself that I would not quit before I reached it - and when we got to that tree, I would find another and swear this was the last one. But Kolya seemed capable of traipsing through the woods, orating with a stage whisper, for hours at a time.

Crisis? What Crisis?: Britain in the 1970s by Alwyn Turner (Aurum Press 2008)

When the Ropers were given their own series, George and Mildred, they moved out of their Earl's Court home (compulsorily purchased by the council) and bought a new house in the distinctly middle class Hampton Wick, despite George’s misgivings about suburbia: 'All BBC2 and musical toilet rolls.' A new element was added to the existing mix in the form of naked class war between Roper and his next-door Tory neighbour, Jeffrey Fourmile (Norman Eshley). 'I’m working-class and and bloody proud of it,' declares George and the resultant tension between his determination to cling to his class roots and his wife's desperation to escape hers provided many of the series' sharpest lines. When Mildred tries to persuade him to join the Conservative association - in the hope of getting a cheap holiday - she insists that the Tories are essentially a social organisation who just organize events, at which he spits, 'Yeah, whist drives in aid of the death penalty.' Meanwhile the estate agent Fourmile was sitcom's first overt Thatcherite; 'Socialism: The Way Ahead,' he says, reading the spine of a book as he sorts out a stall at a jumble sale. 'Hmm. put that with the fiction, I think.'
Despite his protestations, it's not hard to see Roper secretly putting his cross on the ballot paper for Thatcher, nor to see him joined in the polling booth by Garnett, Fawlty, Rlgsby and even perhaps Eddie Booth. Alongside them would have been not only Fourmile, but also Margo in The Good Life and from Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? - Bob Ferris, an aspirant member of the middle class who might have voted Liberal in 1974, but would surely have opted for Thatcher in 1979. Against these massed ranks, British sitcoms in the '70s could offer few genuinely left-wing characters, possibly Wolfie, the parody of a revolutionary in Citizen Smith, certainly Mike in Till Death Us Do Part, who would ostentatiously read copies of the Morning Star, Milltant and Workers Press in front of Alf Garnett, but there were very few others.

Football Dynamo: Modern Russia and the People’s Game by Marc Bennetts (Virgin Books 2008)

While the Soviet economy may have been falsified, its football, according to Utkin, was somewhat cleaner. 'In the Soviet era,’ he said, pausing to gaze at a group of model-type Russian girls giggling on the first floor of the restaurant, ‘the stakes in the game weren’t so big, and there wasn‘t really the material incentive to fix matches. Then, it was more of a political thing. Making sure that the Moscow teams did well, that the Ukrainians were kept happy with a cup or two, and so on. Anyway, that’s not really the main point. It’s difficult to compare the two. Soviet footballers weren’t paid anything like as much, and even if they did get some money there was nothing to spend it on. They played for honour, for their team, for the political or social structure it represented. Basically, comparing Soviet football and Russian football is like comparing a Dostoevsky novel and a modern-day bestseller. The first was created with love, out of the sheer pleasure of the act itself, the second is a commercial thing, with financial concerns behind it.

Shakespeare Wrote For Money by Nick Hornby (Believer Books 2008)

Robert Altman's Nashville is one of my favorite films - or, at least, I think it is. I haven’t seen it in a while, and the last time I did, I noticed the longueurs more than I ever had before. Maybe the best thing to do with favorite films and books is to leave them be: to achieve such an exalted position means that they entered your life at exactly the right time, in precisely the right place, and those conditions can never be re-created. Sometimes we want to revisit them in order to check whether they were really as good as we remember them being, but this has to be a suspect impulse, because what it presupposes is that we have more reason to trust our critical judgments as we get older, whereas I am beginning to believe that the reverse is true.I was eighteen when I saw Nashville for the first time, and I was electrified by its shifts in tone, its sudden bursts of feeling and meaning, its ambition, its occasional obscurity, even its pretensions. I don’t think I’d ever seen an art movie before, and I certainly hadn’t seen an art movie set in a world I recognized. So I came out of the cinema that night a slightly changed person, suddenly aware that there was a different way of doing things. None of that is going to happen again, but so what? And why mess with a good thing? Favorites should be left where they belong, buried somewhere deep in a past self.